Virtual workspaces

Sessions I haven’t mentioned so far included one on Immersive Education – a 3D virtual reality tool similar to Second Life with real time discussion rooms, and blended with audio, video and web pages. It had been created using Project Wonderland, an open source 3D engine written in java. Some good applications demonstrated, including a virtual workplace for Sun employees, as on any given day 50% of them can be working remotely, and this gives them a place to meet and interact with colleagues. Perhaps something for our collaboration project to look at?

Scott McNealy – co founder of Sun, formerly CEO and now Chairman, always gives a presentation at this conference – it’s always highly anticipated, and heavily attended. His web page describes him as a human quote machine, and over the years I’ve certainly heard him come up with a few! This year his theme was open source – and why software should be open sourced wherever possible. His 5 reasons to use open source were:

It lowers barriers to entry – ie it’s free!
Interoperability is increased
Research and development costs are lower – the community doing much of it
It’s more secure – how many java viruses have you heard of? There are no secrets, as everyone can see the code so there’s nothing to exploit
It lowers the barriers to exit – is it doesn’t work you haven’t spent a fortune on it.

Overall a good talk – he finishes with asking us to think of what other industries could be open sourced, and suggested that the drug development companies would be a good start!

I’m now home, still slightly jet lagged, but a good long walk round Monsal Dale and Millers Dale yesterday blew a lot of cobwebs away!

Content creators as criminals

It takes a good speaker to make copyright and IP interesting, but we were lucky to have one yesterday. Larry Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University and founder of Creative Commons, gave what had to be the best session of the conference. It was based on the premise that laws surrounding copyright, which were developed many, many years ago to deal with mainly the printed medium, are being applied to regulate the use of digital media, and it isn’t working. A good example he gave was a mother who posted a 29 second clip of her 18 month old son dancing on YouTube. In the background there was a a Prince track playing, and the artist’s distributors, Universal, asked YouTube to take the clip down, as it infringed their copyright - you can find lots of references to it on the internet, especially as the mother sued Universal and got her clip back!

There are many things you can do with a book which are unregulated – you can read it, give it away, even use it as a door stop. There are fair use agreements which mean you can copy parts of it, for example you want to review it. However, in terms of digital media, every use is considered to be equivalent to making a copy, for example every time someone views a web page, so every “use” has to be regulated and requires permission.

Creative Commons licences were created to allow content creators – who are often amateurs as opposed to professionals – to specify the rights they want to apply to their content.

He finished with the thought that either our kids will stop creating, or there will be a revolution and they will reject copyright law. It isn’t acceptable to build a world where the most creative are considered to be criminals.

Excellent speaker, and very thought provoking talk.

Boomer, Gen X and Millenials

An early start again – I’m not sure why, but all American conferences seem to start at 8am. I had had an early morning wake up call, when someone (who shall remain nameless but he knows who he is), texted me at 4am to tell me about the earthquake! I wasn’t impressed.

One of the first sessions this morning was about Generations, Technology and workstyles from Neil Howe. A very entertaining and interesting session about different generations, the things that have affected them and their attitude to technology and the workplace. The generations identified were:

The GI generation – born between 1901 and 1924, so today are aged 83 and over. Walt Disney. John Wayne. Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, Maggie Thatcher, Ghandi. Protected by a huge wave of child protection laws, prohibition, free vitamins, drug act. The most uniformed generation. Went to moon. Optimistic. Identification with public purpose. Their children are the Boomer generation.
IT/innovation – vacuum tube, radio and TV networks, newsreels

The Silent Generation – born between 1925 and 1942, so today are aged between 65 and 82. Colin Powell, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley, Gorbachev, Chirac.
The crisis generation – lived through many. Kept heads down in McCarthy era. Married and had kids earlier than any other generation. Fortunate. Upwardly mobile all lives. Conformed.
IT /innovation – mainframe, transistor, hi-fi, avant-garde media

Boomers – born between 1943 and 1960, so are aged between 47 and 64
Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Tony Blair, me!
Individualism – sense of self-sufficiency. Rejected establishment. Didn’t trust anyone over 30, now want to police anyone under 30. Took drugs to think outside the box, now give kids drugs to behave inside the box.
IT/innovation – integrated circuit, PC, VCR, cable TV, alternative and new journalism

Gen X- born between 1961 and 1981, so today are aged between 26 and 46
Barrack Obama, Kurt Cobain, Tiger Woods, David Cameron
Comfortable with winners and losers. Heard many negative predictions about themselves. Hate politics, don’t vote. Very few public figures, but a lot in business. Had “unwanted” childhoods. Divorce rate ramped up, schools no longer worked, fertility rate fell, didn’t seem to want kids. Culture turned anti child. Evil child movie era. Latch key kids. But, they revived the economy and are efficient and resilient.
IT/innovation – microchip, internet, digital media, cellphone, blog, web commerce

Millennial generation – born from 1982 onwards, so today are aged up to 25
Mark Zuckerberg, Hilary Duff.
New sense of protection of kids. Divorce rate went down, “baby on board” stickers appeared. Evil child movies stopped and cuddly baby movies produced. Which then became cuddly teen movies. Kids became protected. Child abuse hysteria. Child protection gadgets. Cycle helmets. Behavioural changes – reduction in violent crime by teenagers, reduction on risk taking.
Key IT/innovation – wimax, social networks, wiki, IM, mobile device, texting

Things to remember when dealing with them in the workplace or at college:
They’re special – want to be treated as VIPs, and you need to co-recruit the parents. Parents are all over them, even in their 20s. Biggest problem to teachers is parents. 4% even attend their kid’s job interviews!
They’ve been sheltered – pso need to provide a supervised environment. They love counselling.
They’re conventional – which is a surprise to most of their boomer parents. 40 to 50% live with parents. Cell phone has become the world’s longest umbilical cord
They plan– don’t offer them a temporary job.
They’re team oriented – make them part of the group. Use technology to create communities.
They’re active in the community – be active yourself. They volunteer. For Gen X kids, community service was a punishment! They vote and take an interest in social issues.

I haven’t done justice to the talk in my brief notes, but it was interesting afterwards talking to delegates about which generation we fitted into, and whether we could recognise the generalisations made about them. For the most part we could. I am definitely a Boomer, and my kids definitely Millenials! He finished with a nice slide illustrating the high achieving nature of the Millenials:

Free beer, or free puppy?

Sun have just bought mySQL, the open source web database company, and one of the VPs was taking part in one of the sessions. He was great – very interesting, and gave a lot of insights into the world of open source, particularly into the commercial aspects. Obviously because of the theme of the conference he talked a lot about the community aspects of open source development. In his words, “if you operate transparently your users will tell you if you screw up”. Scale fast and fail fast – if something’s not working, find out why and do something differently.

We also had a session on some of Sun’s products for storage and HPC. This was a much more technical session, and one which I won’t go into in too much detail – lots of talk about teraflops (a great word). Also mentioned was project Blackbox – this is a datacentre in a shipping container. I saw one last year at this conference, and wanted one! A shipping container full of racks. Three plugs on the outside – power, data and chilled water. A datacentre that you could put in a car park, or a warehouse. You might not want to have Sun plastered all over it if you were going to put it in a car park though.

A panel session on open source in admin computing produced a good quote about open source not being free and needing a lot of support: “It’s not free beer, it’s a free puppy”.

Final sessions of the day were on energy and the environment. Sun have a VP for Eco Responsibility, and seem to be taking the issues seriously. In order to be sustainable, we’re going to have to be innovative – computing being part of the solution to how we do things differently but also part of the problem. I’ve quoted this before, but IT is responsible for as many carbon emissions as the airline industry. Although Sun are looking at many areas – they saved 99m sheets of paper for example by not printing their Annual Report – their main priority is energy efficiency of computers. Some facts:

Data centres cost $7.2billion to operate annually
Power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005 and will probably double again by 2010
60% of data centres are running out of power, cooling and space
Utility grids are not keeping up with the demand for power.

He outlined a number of initiatives Sun are taking, including redesigning data centres, rolling out sunrays instead of PCs (they use about 1/20th of the power), looking at energy efficiency at every component level and designing for disassembly and recycling.

Communities

The conference opens, with a video introduction from Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz. The theme of the conference is “The Power of Communities”, and the first session is from Joe Hartley, Sun VP for Global Government, Education and Healthcare
- he also bears a striking resemblance to Steve Martin and I keep expecting him to break into a stand up routine! He talks about communities and networking, and how some of the new technologies are facilitating the establishment of communities. Communities are only successful if they members of them have commitment to them, and can either provide or obtain value from them. He introduced some of Sun’s ideas of communities especially those surrounding open source software.

The second speaker was Barry Libert from Mzinga, and co author of a book entitled “We are Smarter Than Me”. Co-author normally means there’s one, or two others, but in this case there were 5,100 contributors. Barry used the concept that WE based organisations could be more successful then ME based ones – ie those that embraced the concept of community could gain a competitive advantage, and that the pervasiveness of the internet and the rise of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies was facilitating this. Some interesting statistics – 36% of Americans use Wikipedia, 112m people write blogs, and many millions more read them, there are more podcasts than radio programmes, there are 250m pieces of tagged social media on the internet, and 65m Facebook users.

Some examples of how this “WE” culture can be used in organisations:
To develop new products – the Dell Idea Storm
To support users – Apple support forums
To sell products – eBay (apparently there are more people making a living from eBay than are employed by Wal-Mart)
To provide finance for projects – prosper.com and kiva.org being two good examples
To do proprietary research – Innocentive
To write code – open source software development

Some of the links are worth looking at. OK, back to the conference (this is my lunch break...)

The world famous Bushman

Trip to the garlic restaurant was an experience - especially if you don't like garlic! We tried the garlic ice cream, but weren't impressed - it tasted very metallic. I much preferred the vanilla with chocolate sauce! Had a couple of drinks afterwards in one of my favourite San Francisco bars - The Saloon - just across the road. It's a great place, a bit of a dive but that's part of its charm. Live music every night - last night we heard Johnny Nitro and the Doorslammers - amazing saxophinist in the band. Only problem was the amount of Jack Daniels you get in a glass - I had three and probably drank half a bottle.....

This morning we had time to cross the bay on a ferry before the conference starts properly this afternoon - nice views of Alcatraz in sunshine because at last it's stopped raining! It looks quiet a nice place in the sun, but you wouldn't want to stay there! On the way back I saw one of the San Francisco characters - the Bush Man. He hides behind some shrubbery, and jumps out and scares people! I've been coming here for 11 years, and I've seen him every time. Wouldn't be the same without him!

My Favourite City.....

So. San Francisco. One of my favourite cities. But - it's raining, and cold, and windy. Like Sheffield! Arrived last night (or early yesterday afternoon depending on what clock you're on) in a storm. It was the Chinese New Year Parade, and the chinese dragons had plastic bags over their heads! I felt sorry for the dancers who carried on despite the rain and the wind blowing everything away. Lots of great fireworks - including firecrackers being thrown towards the crowd - wouldn't get that in the UK!

Today the weather was a little better, and the sun came out at the Martin Luther King memorial - a wonderful waterfall that you walk behind and there are quotes from him in several different languages etched onto the stone wall.

Had to get a cable car to the Bay (it's compulsory when here) and say hello to the Sea Lions who laze on wooden pallettes off the Pier. They make me laugh - huge, lazy, noisy creatures who climb over each other and push each other into the water.

Off to the Stinking Rose tonight - a garlic restaurant. Everything has garlic in it. Even the ice cream!

Exec Away Day

The executive team had an awayday yesterday and spent some time revisiting work we've being doing over the past year. We confirmed the departmental vision, and looked at aways of making changes to achieve it - the comments from the world cafe meetings were very helpful. We also discussed ways of communicating within the department - especially as were are now on 13 sites - and how to liaise with the University, at an operational level as well as strategic. We also had an interesting presentation on leadership and management, what makes a good leader and why is it different form management. Lots of discussion on delegation, and how it can sometimes be difficult to delegate if you feel people are already overloaded.

I'm at the Sun Microsystems Worldwide Education and Research Conference for the next few days, so expect a couple of pictures of San Francisco!